Tuesday, 26 March 2013

Adventure awaits: Card driven Dungeoneering!

Another
little break from all things Oldhammer, today I’d like to share some Old School
dungeoneering instead. Some time ago I made my mind up to develop a card driven
system for solo/GM-less dungeon bashing. What I came up with was a system of
cards, one pack to describe rooms and corridors, one pack to drive events and
another to drive encounters. Treasure to be added later.

Each room
or corridor section explored triggers the draw of a dungeon card. This gives an
interesting description of the area and any contents. It also goes on to indicate if something more
is happening as an event, encounter or both could be triggered by the room
card.

Adventure
cards are only drawn when a dungeon card indicates to do so. They contain
descriptions of random events such as traps, weird sightings, sounds and smells,
dungeon furniture, loot and plunder or NPC encounters. They may even trigger
further monster encounters.

Monster
cards are triggered by either Dungeon or Adventure cards each card representing
a random number of monsters of a given level.

A little on
the design philosophy.

By removing events from the rooms they occur in a greater variety of rooms can occur, not
every guard room will now look the same and thanks to the monster cards the
guards you find there will vary as much as your monster cards. I really wanted
to include the heady unpredictability of old school dungeons so some event
cards include random tables making the variety of adventures obtainable even
greater.

Some of the
cards interact for example a randomly encountered sound may be more meaningful
later on if a particular room is reached when certain things will occur only if
the sound has been heard. Or perhaps an NPC will be very interested in items
found or encounters experiences already or in the future. I have included
enough challenges of different sorts to ensure thieves, magicians, fighters and
clerics will all be useful if not necessary in your adventure party. Currently
the cards exist as a system agnostic version and a Labyrinth Lord/Osric/ADnD
version with illustrations pulled off the web. If there is enough interest from
people I’ll clean them up put on good legal Illustrations on
and post them here for all to use.

To give you
an idea what sort of adventure I’ve been having with the cards I present my
first little venture into the Chaos of Caverns: